Monday, December 6, 2010

The Return of Name that Movie Monday! Challenge #19!

It's time for Challenge #19 here at the ol' Arcana! Can you identify this week's mystery photo, scanned direct from The Holecheck Archives? If you think you recognize it, post a comment below. As the week goes on, if no one guesses correctly I'll begin adding some pretty useless hints. Easy, right?

Here ya' go -- good luck!

UPDATE:

The Swedish shinobi strikes again! Fred Anderson (Ninja Dixon) plucks his second win by identifying Umberto Lenzi's Eyeball (1975). Unjustly maligned by most, I think the film serves as one of the director's most enjoyable romps; it's a sleazy, slash-happy giallo concerning a ragtag group of tourists -- a lesbian photographer, a shady priest, a cheating wife, a slutty schoolgirl, and more! -- having their numbers trimmed by an ocular-obsessed psycho in a red rain slicker. And, of course, it's all set to an infectious Bruno Nicolai score. What's not to like? Snobs, I tell you.

Eyeball received its belated Stateside release in 1978 courtesy of exploitation magnates Joseph Brenner Associates, Inc., who saw fit (as usual) to rework the title sequence and speed up the tempo by deleting some extraneous investigation footage. It was a badly cropped version of this edit that hit the VHS scene in 1985, adorned with some of the most boring cover art you're likely to see, from JBA's usual standby, Prism Entertainment. (My first knowledge of the film actually came from the cross-promo inclusion of its awesomely trashy trailer on the Prism tape of Pete Walker's Frightmare II.)

The earliest DVD on the scene was the 2002 Labyrinth des Schreckens (Labyrinth of Fright) disc from Germany's Marketing Film, which featured an anamorphic transfer of the original European version in its full 2.35:1 ratio, along with some stills and a trailer. (Seeing the film properly presented definitely boosts one's opinion!) This print was later recycled for the 2004 rerelease from X-Rated Kult Video. There's also a 2007 Italian disc from Pulp Video, though I'm unsure if this offers an upgrade or not. For some inexcusable reason, there hasn't been a domestic DVD release to date, a situation that desperately needs to be remedied. (Severin? Midnight Legacy? Synapse? Anybody?! Somebody start a petition!)